At 9/11 Site, Balancing Reverence and Retailing

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Published: March 29, 2004

At the new World Trade Center, an area of six acres will be set aside for mourning and remembering. And in the surrounding buildings and concourses, an area of 650,000 square feet - almost 15 acres - will be set aside for shopping and dining.

Obviously, retailing will play a critical role in the redevelopment of ground zero. By its very nature, it will not be conventional, serving a constantly changing mix of neighbors, office workers, commuters and tourists. The stores are supposed to help reanimate a devastated precinct, but in muted, respectful tones, standing where a horrific event occurred, overlooking voids that are meant to mark inconsolable loss.

In other words, the retail space poses planning challenges rivaling those faced by the memorial, the Freedom Tower and the combined PATH terminal and transportation hub.

Now that the design of those projects is well under way, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site and controls the retail lease, is focusing its attention on the shops and restaurants. What will they be? Where will they go? Who will develop and run them?

For possible starters, there is serious talk about a stand-alone department store on the southwest corner of Vesey and Church Streets, where a second office tower is eventually to rise. Whatever happens, that corner - next to the PATH terminal and within sight of the Millenium Hilton Hotel, Century 21 and Brooks Brothers - seems to be the likeliest place for the first significant retail construction.

"That would be great if we got that restored in the next three to four years," said Joseph J. Seymour, the executive director of the Port Authority. "That would go a long way towards healing and restoring viable, lively street life there."

The chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan, Madelyn Wils, said she believed that a full-service department store would be an ideal anchor for retail development at the trade center. As it is - with all due respect to Century 21 - there is no department store closer than Herald Square, she said.

"A good anchor store would set the stage for other retail," Ms. Wils said, "and an anchor store sooner rather than later should be the goal at the trade center."

Construction of the Freedom Tower is to begin this year. But the four other office buildings planned around the trade center site are further off. So officials envision interim low-rise retail structures on the tower sites, either to stand temporarily or to serve as the podiums from which the skyscrapers would ultimately rise.

Different areas of the trade center site will have different retail characteristics. Church Street is the most logical place to concentrate above-ground stores, Mr. Seymour said. Underground shops, on two levels, will follow the corridors leading to and from the PATH terminal being designed by Santiago Calatrava, with DMJM + Harris and STV.

The Calatrava building itself is a "combination of art and architecture," in Mr. Seymour's words. "Is it a good idea to have commercial retail in the actual station?" Mr. Seymour asked. "If it is, it would have to be very tastefully done."

On one point, Mr. Seymour sounded a little more certain: no malls.

Having just returned from a trip to Chicago, where he visited multistory shopping centers like Water Tower Place and the 900 North Michigan Shops, Mr. Seymour said in an interview last week: "I've seen a lot of urban malls that are really suburban malls put in an urban area. New York is much different. People have different shopping patterns."

"I think New York City is more oriented to specialized streets, like Spring Street in SoHo," he said. "I don't know if doing that massive mall would work in New York."

"I'm not saying there shouldn't be a certain amount of mall-type shops," Mr. Seymour said, "but we have to look at specialty shops."

The authority plans to put together a tentative retail program and then issue a request for proposals from developers. A shopping center operator based in Australia, Westfield America, has paid $1 million for the right to make the first offer on the new retail lease. Westfield held the trade center retail lease until last year, when it was bought by the Port Authority for $140 million.

Whoever runs the retail space will undoubtedly face questions about the propriety of certain shops and restaurants on Greenwich Street, across from the memorial. Apart from saying that the "location of the retail has to be very sensitive," however, Mr. Seymour said he did not envision the authority "controlling the tenant mix, because that's not our expertise."

"For my retailers - Godiva, Papyrus, Tourneau - it was their No. 1 store in their chain," said Faith Hope Consolo, vice chairwoman of the Garrick-Aug Worldwide brokerage. "Most of my retailers are anxiously awaiting the return of the, quote-unquote, World Trade Center."

"Maybe we'd see some of the large superstores that we haven't seen before: home furnishings, a Crate &#38; Barrel, a Williams-Sonoma," Ms. Consolo said. "Nordstrom, just before the demise of the trade center, was very, very focused on downtown."

Though the master plan for the trade center site calls for up to 1 million square feet of retail space, Mr. Seymour said it appeared that 650,000 square feet would work.

One of the authority's retail consultants, Jones Lang LaSalle, agrees that 650,000 square feet would be appropriate. "We think we can create a unique retail environment that respects the open space and the design of the PATH terminal and still meets the need from a retail perspective," said Cubie H. Dawson Jr., a senior vice president at LaSalle.

The firm, a real estate and money management concern based in Chicago, and one of its corporate predecessors, LaSalle Partners, have been involved in the redevelopment of a number of transportation centers around the nation, including Grand Central Terminal, with the retail developer Williams Jackson Ewing.

Callison Architecture, based in Seattle, is also involved in the retail planning. Bill Lacey, the Callison principal working on the trade center site, has had experience with retail developments in other extraordinarily sensitive locations, like the Manezh shopping center near Red Square in Moscow (when he was with Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum) and the Oriental Plaza in Beijing, near Tiananmen Square.

He said of the trade center, "The physical realities, combined with the emotional realities, make it - without question - one of the most unique undertakings anywhere."

"Cities do need to evolve," Mr. Lacey said of the prospect of a retail renaissance opposite the trade center memorial. "Yet it needs to be very carefully balanced with the sanctity of the other side of the street."